In the news

The Old North Grocery Co-op received some much-deserved attention recently as Roger Beachy, director of the USDA’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture, listened to how the co-op helps fill the gap in a former urban food desert. Kent Faddis reports.

Governor Jay Nixon expresses his support for higher education and the University of Missouri during the Legislative Day rally.

Sandy Stegall, director, constituent relations, reports that Legislative Day was a big success:

It takes the entire MU Extension family to create an excellent Legislative Day, and this year was no exception. With a total attendance of 340, it was great to see our volunteers making the rounds of the Capitol to deliver positive messages about the value of MU Extension education in the lives of Missourians and about the impact MU Extension makes on creating and sustaining jobs.

There are too many people to thank to name them all here, but whether you staffed the registration desk, set up tables, greeted legislators and their staff at breakfast, visited legislators in their offices or in the halls, set up and staffed displays, helped conduct or participated in the ISE, contributed to or participated in the afternoon State Extension Council-sponsored meeting, stuffed packets, provided technical support … or added your talents to other functions I can’t even remember to mention at the moment, THANK YOU.

Pictures and PowerPoint presentations are available on the share drive at S:\UMSystem\Coop Media\Photos 2011\Legislative Day.

To support discussions related to the Congressional budget, MU Extension is participating in a national social media campaign to increase awareness of extension and spread stories of how extension has helped people and communities. Stories will be sent to legislators next week, so it is important to collect as many as possible by Friday, March 4. Add your stories on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/CooperativeExtension or Twitter at http://twitter.com/CESValue. On Twitter, you can use the #CESValue hashtag from your account to have tweets included in the campaign.

Fairs and exhibitions are “deeply woven into the very DNA of Extension,” writes Don Nicholson, 4-H youth development specialist, in the February issue of the Journal of Extension. His article, “Fairs and Other Exhibitions: Have We Really Thought This Through?” argues that there is too little research on the value of fairs and similar events in advancing the Extension mission.

“Now is the perfect time to be thoughtful and intentional and begin significant efforts to measure and prove (or disprove) the value of Extension’s role in perhaps the largest single investment in all of Extension,” Nicholson writes. Read the article online at http://www.joe.org/joe/2011february/comm1.php.

In the 1980s, poets and artists in resource-strapped Cuba founded an independent press that made imaginative use of available materials, including scrap paper and other discarded items. The group’s handcrafted books would develop into sophisticated art objects that are now sought by collectors the world over. The press is known as Ediciones Vigía.

Julie Middleton, director of organizational development, is part of a dynamic team of faculty from across MU that will work
to foreground, record and preserve Ediciones Vigía’s history and the evolution of its aesthetics and creative processes.

The project, funded by a Mizzou Advantage grant, will include a global conference in October 2012 to share these creative works. Middleton will work with the MU Extension conference office to ensure outreach into universities around the nation, mobilizing the expansive extension network and engaging international scholars through the use of streaming video facilitated by MU Extension's Cooperative Media Group.

The project’s principal investigator, Juanamaria Cordones-Cook, MU professor of Romance languages and literatures, says the artists in Ediciones Vigía engaged in a practice of sustainability, bricolage, which according to entrepreneurship scholars makes do “by applying combinations of the resources at hand to new problems and opportunities.”

MU Extension is reaching out to farmers and school districts across the state with its recent Farm to School workshops. Read about the success of the effort spearheaded by Bill McKelvey, Farm To Institute project coordinator: http://extension.missouri.edu/news/DisplayStory.aspx?N=1037. The next workshop will be broadcast at 3 p.m. on Wednesday to Extension TeleCenters in Maryville, Trenton, Independence, Columbia, Salem and Poplar Bluff.

The 10th annual Cambio de Colores (Change of Colors) conference will be held June 8-10 in Kansas City. Cambio de Colores is a collaborative effort of University of Missouri Extension and other educational institutions in the Midwest region, as well as government and private organizations. The conference brings together researchers, practitioners, decision-makers and community members to discuss the issues that Missouri and all the Heartland states face as a result of the demographic changes reflected since the 2000 Census. Large numbers of immigrants—most of them Latino or Hispanic, but also including significant numbers of migrants and refugees from Asia, Africa and Europe—are settling in rural and urban areas of every state in the region.

The 2011 meeting will be a special multistate conference that will showcase research and best practices from midwestern and southern states.